A test plan in IBM® Rational® Quality Manager includes the following predefined sections:
Each section includes its own editor. Some sections, such as the Business Objectives and Test Objections sections, consist of a rich-text editor for text input. These editors provide common formatting features such as table support, font support, bullets, and numbered lists.
Other test plan sections, such as the Requirements and Tests Cases sections, provide links to these additional test artifacts.
Still other sections include tables that establish and measure against criteria such as Exit Criteria, Entrance Criteria, Quality Objectives, and Test Schedules.
You can add your own sections and remove sections that you do not need using the Manage Sections feature.
A test plan is based on a test plan template. When you create a new test plan, you choose a template to base it on. You can start a new test plan with one of the default templates, or you can create new ones. You can also designate which templates are the default.
A test plan template is a collection of test plan sections. You create a template by adding and removing existing sections or creating new sections. If the section names do not match what you are accustomed to, create new sections and add them to a template.
Each test organization can design their own test templates. This flexibility makes the test plan suitable for both agile and formal test teams and for teams that perform different kinds of testing, such as functional regression testing, performance testing, system verification testing, globalization testing, and so on.
Test plan categories are used in the Summary section of a test plan.
You can use test plan categories to help organize your test plans into logical groups. Later, when you use the All Test Plans feature to list all of your test plans, you can sort the listing using the categories.
By default, two test plan categories are provided: Product and Release. You can add your own products to the Product category and your own Release numbers. You can also create your own categories, such as Test Type, Component, or Division.
A work item is a way of keeping track of the tasks and issues that your team needs to address. The status and number of work items are indicators of the health of your project. Out-of-the-box, Rational Quality Manager includes the following work item types:
To assign a section of a test plan to another team member, click Work Item: Create on the right side of the test plan section and specify a summary description, owner, and completion date of the work item. This results in the creation of a Task-Quality work item.
From a test plan you can manage other test artifacts, such as test cases and requirements. However, it is also possible to use the product without a test plan. The topic on test artifact relationships describes the relationships between tests plans and other test artifacts, such as test cases, requirements, test scripts, keywords, test data, and so on.
Here are some of the many tasks that you can perform with the Rational Quality Manager test plan: